Winter Soldier Read Free Page B

of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is leaching out into the broader populace. Increasingly, veterans and active-duty members of the Armed Forces get reinforcement that they are not alone.
    Indeed, immediately following the Congressional Progressive Caucus hearing, U.S. Army Sergeant Matthis Chiroux announced he was refusing orders to deploy to Iraq in July. Chiroux said the idea of a deployment to Iraq initially made him suicidal. “I just went into my room and shut the door and barely emerged for close to a month. I just sat in my room reading news about Iraq and feeling completely hopeless, like I would be forced to go and no one would ever know how I felt. I was getting looped into participating in a crime against humanity and all with the realization that I never wanted to be there in the first place.”
    The turning point, Chiroux said, came when one of his professors at Brooklyn College in New York suggested he listen to a broadcast of March’s Winter Soldier hearings.
    “Here’s an organization of soldiers and veterans who feel like me,” he said. “All this alienation and depression that I feel started to ease. I found them, and I’ve been speaking out with them ever since.”
A Note on the Testimony:
    The text of Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations comes from testimony offered by veterans in Silver Spring, Maryland, from March 13 to 16, 2008, and in front of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on May 15, 2008. Due to space constraints, this book does not represent an exhaustive preparation of all the information presented at either gathering. Each testimony has been edited and a few of the testifiers could not be accommodated. Complete video archives of every veteran’s testimony are available on Iraq Veterans Against the War’s website, www.ivaw.org. Complete audio archives are available at www.warcomeshome.org.
    Each veteran who testified at Winter Soldier went through an extensive verification before they were allowed to testify. A team of veterans and journalists collected documentation of every testifier’s proof of service, including their military discharge papers (DD214s), ID cards, and corroborating evidence to support their stories. Photos, videos, military orders, Standard Operating Procedures, Rules of Engagement cards, and anything else the testifier could provide was collected in the testifier’s file. Veterans and journalists also contacted testifiers’ battle buddies (people they served with) and located media reports that corresponded with the dates, locations, and units the testifiers mentioned in their stories. We placed a stringent burden of proof on testifiers to demonstrate that they were deployed when and where they said they were.
    IVAW and Aaron Glantz
    August 2008

Rules of Engagement

Introduction
    War causes death. There’s no way around that, but over hundreds of years, the Law of War has developed. These internationally agreed-upon standards set out what legally can and cannot be done by soldiers deployed into battle. These laws are designed to keep soldiers on both sides safe from torture and ill treatment and to ensure that innocent civilians are not killed unnecessarily.
    These standards, which are set down in the Geneva Conventions, require warring parties to distinguish between lawful military targets and unlawful civilian ones. The Law of War specifically forbids attacks on hospitals, schools, places of worship, and other central parts of the civilian infrastructure. Direct, intentional attacks on noncombatants are also prohibited.
    Servicemen and women learn these rules in training, and when they’re deployed into battle they receive more specific Rules of Engagement that state what is and is not permitted given the mission at hand. In the Iraq War, the Rules of Engagement were initially quite restrictive.
    “Do not target or strike any of the following except in self-defense: … civilians, hospitals, mosques,